Success Story
Trailer Industry
Dynamic staff planning and line balancing in final assembly line
MISSION
The trailer industry is a highly competitive market with low margins. Our customer is a market leader and masters perfectly the lean methods and philosophy. Nevertheless, the management wanted to improve the performance in the final assembly line. With the introduction of our Production Optimization module for dynamic staff assignment and line balancing the customer is now able to react in real time, whenever a rescheduling is necessary or a cycle time delay occurs.
SOLUTION AND WORK PROCESS
After a succesfull proof of concept, the implementation assembly started:
Specification of real time staff planning and data requirements
Integration of work step sequences, formerly listed in Excel files, in our application
Realization of line balancing with drag & drop functionalities to move processes from one station to another
Automatic scheduling of tasks and interactive gantt chart to visualize the staff assignements under consideration of qualification and process dependencies
Periodically rescheduling of task list depending on cycle time deviations and communication on tablets
Simulation results available in seconds, based on real time data availability
RESULTS
The critical success factor in this project was high data quality and availability. By introducing REALTIME TECHNOLOGIES, the customer got transparency on planning data and was able to profit from high benefits.
Reduction of cycle time deviation due to the lack of transparency from 12% to 0
Reduction of staff for optional processes by 25%
Reduction for staff planning from 5 hours (static planning) to 3 seconds (dynamic planning)
